Call Me Joe

by Martin Van Es

  The Mercedes was waiting at the front of the hotel for them. The bustle of the lobby was continuing with little evidence that the black-out had ever happened apart from a greater number of conversations being struck up between strangers as they compared notes on what they had just witnessed. No one understood what had happened and everyone was talking about their own experience of the twelve minutes, but they still seemed to be doing their jobs and sticking to their schedules. Life was going on just as Haki had assumed it would.

  “What happened, do you think?” he asked as they both slid into the back seat and the driver closed the doors with reassuringly solid thuds.

  “It seems we were treated to a glimpse of the great nothingness that lies beyond consciousness,” Tanzeel said with a smile. “It was an interesting experience, no?”

  “Do you have everything you need?” the driver asked. “Is the temperature comfortable?”

  “We are very comfortable, thank you,” Tanzeel assured her and she turned her attention to the road outside, pulling smoothly and quietly away from the hotel, her eyes constantly flicking up to the rearview mirror.

  “Treated to by whom?” Haki persisted. “By God?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “At the moment I don’t know what to think.”

  “It will certainly give us a lot to talk about this week,” Tanzeel said.

  “Have you been to Yung’s house before?” Haki asked after a few minutes of comfortable silence.

  “I came here while she and Liang were in the process of building it, when they were still spending most of their time in Beijing. It was an enormous project, taking many years. I am looking forward to seeing it now it is finished. I am told it is one of the most important new buildings in the world this century.”

  “Has anyone heard anything from Liang?”

  “Not that I am aware of. It seems he has become one of the ‘disappeared’.”

  Haki fell silent again; having family members disappear without explanation was a concept with which he was agonisingly familiar. He could imagine very clearly how much pain Yung and the rest of their family must be in. Both his parents had disappeared on the day that all his siblings were hacked to death and he had no idea where their bodies ended up. At least 800,000 people were cut down in those hundred days, creating far too many corpses for any survivors to ever hope to be able to find their lost loved ones.

  The driver gave no indication that she could hear their conversation, apparently fully immersed in the job of driving. Roads outside the city which were normally clear and free of all drama were dotted with evidence of accidents caused by the sudden onset of darkness a few hours before. There was a lorry which had veered off the road into a ditch and rolled onto its back like a huge animal surrendering its throat and vulnerable underbelly to an overwhelmingly more powerful opponent. Several cars had driven into trees and other obstacles, twisting their bonnets into angry snarls, but every accident victim they passed already seemed to have enough people helping them, so the Mercedes pressed quietly on towards their destination.

  As they started their climb into the mountains, the roads became totally deserted apart from one small grey car which appeared to be travelling in their slipstream, never more than fifty metres behind. It seemed strange to the driver that whoever was behind the wheel should stay so close when there was so much space all around and no oncoming traffic to stop them from overtaking. She said nothing to her passengers but continued to glance regularly in her rearview mirror, prepared for the following driver to do something unpredictable, constantly aware of their presence. The stickers on the windscreen and its pristine condition suggested it was a rental car. She was confident that if necessary she would be able to pull away easily. She could make out that there was an elderly couple in the front seats, the man hunched uncomfortably over the wheel, his nose almost touching the windscreen. She decided not to inform her passengers until she was sure it was not just another innocent motorist who happened to be travelling along the otherwise deserted road in the same direction as them.

  Snow-capped peaks were visible in the far distance and there were now no buildings to be seen in any direction. It felt like the two cars had left the overpopulated world of mankind far behind, the only sign of civilisation being the smooth tarmac flashing past beneath their wheels. They began to rise towards the snowline and as they came round the final bend the entire mountain range stretched out below them with no sign that the human race had ever existed. Then the road turned into the mountain itself, entering a short tunnel. The small car was still exactly the same distance behind them as it rounded the same corner. Now there was no way for it to turn back. It had no option other than to follow them into the tunnel.

  “This is your destination,” the driver said as they paused in the illuminated tunnel. They had reached a set of gates a few metres inside the man-made cave. The grey car pulled up behind, waiting like them.

  Cameras swivelled above and around them and after a few seconds the gates slid back, revealing a steep ramp up and out onto a terrace, which had been cut into the side of the mountain. They had reached the end of the road. Above them towered Yung and Liang’s steel and glass fortress.

  Both cars came to a halt in front of a glass atrium. A man, who was dressed like a butler, although he looked more the shape of a bodybuilder, emerged from a side door and walked over to them. He was followed by two smaller men. They opened the doors of both cars and courteously helped the passengers out, relieving them of their luggage.

  “Austin,” Tanzeel greeted the tall man who was unravelling himself from the driving seat of the small grey car. “You drove yourself?”

  The two men embraced and Austin introduced his wife, May, a small woman who wore her glasses permanently on the end of her nose, peering disapprovingly over them at the men who towered above her.

  “We’ve taken the opportunity to spend a week touring around the South Island,” Austin explained.

  “In that?” Tanzeel pointed to the car. “With your long legs?”

  “The English universities do not pay as well as your American ones,” Austin laughed self-deprecatingly. In fact, he would always have chosen a modest car anyway. He and his wife had been brought up to live careful, unpretentious lives and no matter how distinguished he might have become in his profession he never felt comfortable with luxury or ostentation.

  “And Austin’s books don’t sell to such a wide audience as yours,” his wife added, without smiling. “He is not interested in being a bestseller.” She seemed to be making a point.

  Austin gave no indication of having heard his wife’s sarcasm, moving on to pump Haki’s hand enthusiastically. “Good to see you again,” he said. “May, this is Haki, the young man from Rwanda I was telling you about.”

  “My husband is a big fan of yours,” she said, shaking his hand.

  “The professor is a great man,” Haki said. “If I can achieve even a small part of what he has then I will die happy.”

  “Indeed,” she burbled cheerfully. “I thought we were all going to die today when the light went out. What a scare we all had.”

  “What did you two make of that?” Austin asked as they all walked into the house, followed by the staff carrying their bags despite Austin protesting that he could carry his own. “I’d be very interested to know.”

  “Dear Austin always has to have answers to everything,” his wife said with a mixture of exasperation and disdain. “He can’t bear any sort of mystery.”

  The professor exchanged the smallest of glances with Tanzeel but said nothing. It had been a bone of contention in their marriage for close to forty years and he no longer saw any point in trying to explain the benefits of intellectual curiosity to someone who had long ago decided that deep thinking wasn’t worth the effort and was, therefore, quite possibly a sign of bad manners.
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  “Miss Yung has suggested that I show you to your rooms,” the butler informed the arrivals, “and then invites you to join her in the drawing room for drinks before dinner.”

  “Are we the first to arrive?” Austin asked.

  “Not quite, Professor. Miss Minenhle is here.”

  “Oh, that woman,” the professor’s wife said. “Did you know she was going to be here, Austin?”

  “Of course. We are all going to be here, hopefully. That’s the point of the whole week.”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “I told you ‘everyone’ was going to be here.”

  “You didn’t tell me she was going to be here,” May continued talking to the back of her husband’s head as he gave his attention to the butler.

  The butler cleared his throat with a discreet cough. “Before we go any further,” he said, “I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave your phones and all other electronic devices with me. If you need access to them during your stay there is a room where the internet can be accessed, or phone calls can be taken outside. I hope that won’t be an inconvenience.”

  “Are you suggesting,” the professor’s wife enquired archly, “that we are security risks?”

  “Miss Yung is worried that all electronic devices are potential security risks,” the butler replied without the slightest change in his tone.

  “Of course.” The professor stepped forward, proffering his phone in its battered leather case. “We completely understand. It’ll do us good to be separated from the damn things for a while.”

  Eight

  The children had filled her room to bursting point and were laughing and talking with a level of innocent joy Sophie had never witnessed before.

  “What’s your name?” Jess, a girl whose increasing tendency to flirt with older men had been a frequent subject of discussion in the staff room, asked the stranger.

  “My name’s Jesus,” he replied, giving Sophie a sidelong glance as if to gauge her reaction to this news, a twinkle in his eye.

  She raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “At last,” she said, “a straight answer to a straight question.”

  “Children deserve straight answers,” he said, grinning.

  She still wasn’t sure if she believed him. Was he teasing the children or was that really his name and he had held back from telling her in case she laughed? He didn’t seem to be a man who would mind if someone teased him about something so harmless.

  “I doubt that,” Hugo said, matter-of-factly, pushing his large glasses back up from where they had slid to on his small nose.

  “He’s just kidding, Hugo,” the girl said. “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m not kidding,” the stranger said, still grinning, “that’s my name. Don’t you like it?”

  “I’m not going to call you that,” Hugo said. “It sounds silly. What’s your other name?”

  “No other name,” he said.

  “The man with no name,” Jess pouted. “Do you think it makes you interesting or something? Do you think it makes you a man of mystery?”

  The stranger shrugged, as if it was up to them whether they believed him or not.

  “We need to think of a name for him,” a boy with the beginnings of a shadow moustache said. “Let’s have a vote.”

  “Justin!” a voice shouted.

  “Archie!” cried another.

  “Thomas the Tank Engine,” shouted a third and they all burst out laughing, throwing out more and more ridiculous names at the same time. Eventually, Sophie put her hand up to quieten them, afraid that neighbouring staff members would hear the commotion and come to investigate.

  “Joe,” Hugo said in a firm voice. “I’m going to call you Joe.”

  “Joe,” the stranger rolled the name around his mouth thoughtfully, “like a shortened version of Joseph?”

  “Yes,” Hugo replied. “I suppose so.”

  “That’s a name I would be very comfortable with.” He turned to Sophie. “Do you think you could get used to calling me that?”

  “Sure,” she laughed. “What’s in a name?”

  “Quite a lot it would seem.” He made a wry face.

  As often happened when Hugo spoke up about something with his strangely high level of confidence, the other children all seemed to accept that Joe was a good name for their new friend. They also appeared to have grown bored of the name-choosing game and were ready to move on to bigger subjects.

  “Where are you from?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Why do you wear such weird clothes?”

  “How long is it since you cut your hair?”

  The questions were coming too thick and fast for Joe to be able to answer and he held up his hands as if to shield himself from so much curiosity.

  “One at a time,” Sophie shouted over them. “And not so loud unless you want the headmaster to find out you’re all here.”

  “Did you have anything to do with blacking out the sun?” Hugo asked in the few seconds of silence that followed.

  “Sure,” Joe said. “Impressive, don’t you think?”

  “You are such a big fat liar,” Jess laughed. “Are you some sort of wizard then? A sort of fit version of Gandalf?”

  “Fit?” Joe laughed.

  “Jess!” Sophie scolded.

  The other girls hooted with laughter and set up a chant, accusing Jess of fancying him and making her blush, partly with pleasure at the attention and partly with embarrassment at having been called out for her brazenness.

  “Do it again then,” she said with a pout, half angry at being mocked but still wanting to keep the man’s eyes on her. “Make it dark again. Make the moon go out.”

  “Now is not the time,” he said. “I shouldn’t really have done it at all. It was too much. People got hurt in accidents, which was definitely not my intention.”

  “So are you never going to do it again?” Hugo asked.

  “Maybe I will. Let’s see how things go.”

  He smiled across at Sophie, catching her staring at him as she tried to work out why he was saying such things, his steady gaze causing her to become flustered. Her obvious discomfort made some of the girls whisper and giggle, which annoyed Jess.

  “So is he your boyfriend, Miss?” she asked with a hint of spite.

  “Is he staying in here tonight?” another joined in.

  “Don’t be so rude,” Sophie snapped, making both girls whisper and snigger even more.

  Ever since she first saw him outside the classroom, Joe’s face had seemed strangely familiar to her and now she remembered why. She’d had a dream a few weeks earlier in which a man looking exactly like this appeared to her, telling her that she was special and that God had a great plan for her. Despite the fact that she had always been an atheist, it was a pleasant dream, leaving her with a smile on her face when she woke up and a warm glow of excitement and expectation that something good was going to happen, a feeling she had never experienced before and which she couldn’t explain.

  Like most dreams it had become a faded memory within minutes of getting up and starting another busy day, but now it came back to her with a startling vividness. As she watched him interacting with the children she wondered if that dream had actually been a vision, telling her to expect this man and signalling that he was someone important who she needed to stay close to and listen to. Or was she in fact still dreaming? Was this what he had meant when she first talked to him and he told her that she would realise she knew him “if she looked deep into her memory”?

  She dug her nails into the palm of her hand and it hurt. No, she was confident she was awake. So what exactly was going on?

  She tried to concentrate on what she actually knew to be true. He had initially told the chil
dren his name was Jesus, so did that mean he was some sort of delusional nutter? Did he actually believe he was the Son of God and that was why he dressed that way? Or was he some sort of spiritual leader of whom she had never heard or, as the children had suggested, a hermit who had been hiding away in the mountains for years, meditating and preparing for whatever task he believed now lay ahead of him? If so, what would that task be? Why did she feel so overwhelmed by his physical presence?

  A sharp knock on the door interrupted her thoughts and silenced the room. They all watched as Sophie opened it a crack, not wide enough to reveal Joe on the sofa. One of the senior tutors, who occupied the room above, was trying to peer in despite the fact that Sophie was obviously blocking her way.

  “Is everything all right in there, Sophie?”

  “Sure,” she said, “we’ve just been doing some improvisations.”

  “It’s past curfew time, you know,” the tutor said, pointing to her watch, “they should all be in the dormitory block unless they have written permission from the headmaster.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Sophie faked surprise, rather unconvincingly, making a few of the children giggle, “is that the time? The evening has gone so fast. Come on guys, all back to the dormitories.”

  The moment the last child had scurried out through the door she gave the tutor a friendly wave and closed it, just in case she tried to investigate further.

  Joe smiled at her as she leaned on the door and breathed a theatrical sigh of relief.

  “They love you,” he said, “the children.”

  “One or two of the girls seemed pretty keen on you too,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “It’s my cool style,” he said, gesturing down at his robe and bare feet. “It’s irresistible to women.”

  “Are you ready to eat now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  As she walked past him to the kitchen area he caught her hand and gave it a squeeze, which could have been meant to be reassuring, or it could have denoted his gratitude for the meal and bed, or could have been merely affectionate. Again she was certain she felt a spark of electricity and instinctively jerked her hand away, immediately regretting such a foolish reaction. Did he now think she was some sort of prude? For a moment she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to breathe normally again and covered her confusion by busying herself with serving up the food.